ABSTRACT
The literature of the Middle Ages, their sagas and romantic ballads, were dismissed as unworthy of the attention of educated men and women. Ruined castles were often regarded with contempt; one writer thought the noble remains of Corfe Castle an object of ‘horror and concern’. In The Castle of Indolence James Thomson gave the world a ‘Gothick’ romance, written in the long-neglected Spenserian stanza which itself came as a breeze from a less conventional world. One of the most striking examples of this Gothick architecture of the eighteenth century is Inveraray Castle, the seat of the Duke of Argyll. The castle consists of a rectangular structure with round towers at each corner, and a great square tower in the middle, rising high over all. In Scotland some notable restorations were carried out between the two World Wars by Sir Robert Lorimer, the architect of the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle.
